THIS WEEK IN PRO CYCLING »

Get the VeloNews Email Newsletter FREE

  Learn More | Archive
Home » Top Stories » Rider Journals »

Vande Velde's View: On your mark. Get set....

By Christian Vande Velde, CSC professional cycling team
Published: Jan. 26, 2006

We’re leaving camp at dark-thirty. It is cold; cold like the winter Olympics will be here in two weeks. Oh yeah, they will be.

Actually, we had great weather here in Tuscany and given the fact that I am going back to my home in Spain I can’t really complain, especially since some of the others, like Jens Voigt, are heading back to a brutal cold spell in Germany, where it’s been hitting minus 38 degrees.

Speaking of Jens, to add insult to injury (no pun intended), he had the screws taken out of his shoulder this morning. Jens is one serious badass and showed some real character gritting his teeth coming back from shoulder surgery.

Last year he demolished us every day during our two camps and this year he was struggling with minimal training under his belt. Still he never complained once, even though he had every right to.

Camp No.1 is over and that is a relief. The tests, the long days on the bike, the meetings, no Internet, the even-longer days in the room, and the first real dose of time away from home and wife can be a shock to some of those on the team. But the camp did serve its purpose and we got in a large amount of work during these past 11 days.

We only had one rainy day where we waited it out until after lunch and ended up returning to the hotel in the dark. I don't mean dusk, either. It was more like that-old-lady-had-no-idea-that-she-almost-killed-me or my-mom-has-probably-already-called-the-cops kind of dark. It was a little over the top, Bjarne, but now it’s over and time to step up another level and race.

A look at my Day-Timer
I do get some time at home this week, where I can recover, hang out with Leah and get ready for the next long block of training and racing. After that, I hit the ground running and don’t stop until I hit the French Riviera. I have five days racing in Mallorca, and then I get to come home for 15 hours to reload the suitcase before I jump on a plane to fly to California for another training camp and then straight into the Tour of California. After that, it’s back home to Girona for three days and then on to Paris-Nice. This will be a tight schedule and one that I hope to get through unscathed and progressing all the way through to Nice.

I was looking at my schedule from last year thinking about how hard it was getting back into the swing of things in Europe after we had spend the winter in the U.S. Right off the bat we were putting out daily fires with the house, and pretty much treading water for three months.

Now, sitting in the study typing this instead of yelling at half-a-dozen Spaniards, because they misplaced a wall, last winter seems years away. We stayed over here this winter and bucked the trend of going back to the States. So now it feels like we never left, because we never did.

Nonetheless, we still made it back to Chi-town for Christmas and partied with family and friends, but we also took in the crazy holiday traditions of Cataluña. Jake, our big Weimaraner is back for his third tour and happy to have a back yard instead of an alley. He has trimmed the number of golfers looking for balls in our backyard to almost zero. If they only knew.

Leah and Levi’s wife, Odessa Gunn, are organizing a really cool tour through Cataluña and up to the mountain town of Puigcerdà. They’re calling it “Insider tours.” So far they’ve found some really great hotels that I never thought even existed in Spain. One of them makes you think dressed-up Stanley Hotel. That one I think we need to visit before the snow goes away and I need to ride – not drive – there.

We will use the corporate credit card. Is that cool Odessa?